I. Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to database systems and related methods. More particularly, the invention relates to computer-implemented systems and methods for creating a database for accounting purposes, such as for preparing financial statements according to various statutory accounting principles.
II. Background Information
Typically, company reports of a corporate group are based on business transactions, each of which are recorded in a document. For example, a business transaction may be an incoming supplier invoice or the withdrawal of goods from stores for production purposes. Large corporate groups incur thousands or hundreds of thousands of such business transactions each month. To facilitate the preparation of a company report within an acceptable time period, totals referred to as totals records are updated in addition to the documents for each account of an enterprise. The totals are saved to totals entries of a totals table and reflect the totals of posting amounts of a posting account, e.g., for a posting period. The individual business transactions are recorded (manually or automatically) via a document entering process, which may be centralized, and are saved as document data records to a document database. In this context, document data records are referred to as single item entries.
Today, many corporate groups must comply with a plurality of statutory accounting principles when preparing and publishing their annual financial statements. For example, a German group listed on a U.S. stock exchange must submit a financial statement under US-GAAP and/or IAS as well as under HGB. It is possible that further financial statements are necessary, for example for subsidiaries in Asian countries, according to local rules. In concrete terms, this means that a plurality of annual financial statements must be prepared and published at the same time. However, the annual financial statements are based on different statutory accounting principles. At the end of a fiscal year, balance-sheet items must, for example, be valued according to the strict lowest cost or market principle for a financial statement under HGB and according to the market price on the reporting date for a financial statement under US-GAAP.
For that reason, it is the task of the accounting department of a corporate group to prepare all data that is relevant to accounting according to different statutory accounting principles. To date, there have been the following fundamental software solutions to comply with these requirements:
Parallel Accounting
The user creates additional accounts (parallel accounts). In this case, accounting entries are made in a common account if they are identical for all statutory accounting principles or they are made in a specific account for each statutory accounting principle if they differ as to the statutory accounting principle used. For the purpose of the annual financial statement, both the common accounts and the accounts for the specific statutory accounting principle are valued for all statutory accounting principles.
As a consequence of this procedure, the number of all accounts to be managed may become very large and, thus, hard to cope with for the bookkeeper. This occurs when a relatively large number of accounting entries differ for various statutory accounting principles. If reporting requires more than two statutory accounting principles, this method is very complex and work-intensive.
Additional General Ledgers with Separate Data-Keeping
By way of example, the SAP R/3 Enterprise system provides an FI-SL (special ledger) application having the character of a toolbox. This application allows the customer to create his or her own general ledgers for additional reports according to statutory accounting principles in separate tables. Posting operations that are only relevant to one of these additional reports must then be entered and posted for the appropriate general ledger via a separate document entering process. As a consequence, this process creates general ledgers that are not directly integrated in central accounting and must, therefore, be matched to each other, this requiring a great amount of work.
According to the state of the art, a corporate group can prepare its financial statements only with the use of data processing systems if related efforts are to be justifiable. The accounting of an internationally active group requires entry and valuation of many millions of posting operations. The individual posting items are saved to databases. The data volume has to be kept as small as possible. Further, the option of an efficient check of individual posting items for auditing purposes must be provided for, and adjustment entries must be included in all group financial statements to be prepared according to the various statutory accounting principles. The matching of data for financial statements according to different statutory accounting principles is particularly work-intensive and represents a possible source of errors.
If an invoice, for whatever reason, is changed after it has already been entered, it must be ensured that this change is taken into consideration in all accounts, journals and general ledgers in which the invoice was entered according to the various statutory accounting principles. As a result, the architecture of an accounting database must meet high requirements to cope with millions of posting operations.
Therefore, a technical solution is needed for preparing financial statements with less effort according to different statutory accounting principles on the basis of a database structure. In addition, various financial statements should have access to matching data.